Mother of invention

It’s taken her years to find the courage to write about the romance that led to her becoming a single mother. The result is her finest novel yet

W
hen Nuala Ní Chonchúir was 22, she went to live in Scotland. The Dubliner departed after her final exam at Trinity College, and headed for a remote fishing village where she had a job lined up at a boutique hotel. It was 1991. While there, she fell for an older artist from New Zealand. “It was a four-month, tempestuous affair,” says the author. After the romance had died, Ní Chonchúir discovered she was pregnant.

“No matter what way I came at it, I couldn’t think about doing anything but having the baby and keeping it, and raising it myself,” she says. “It wasn’t an ideal situation, but that was my decision.”

The Kiwi artist went back to his side of the world, and Ní Chonchúir returned to Dublin, where she had grown up in a particularly Catholic household. “We didn’t just go to mass, we went to these charismatic [renewal]